Scott
Puritan Board Graduate
This is an excerpt from a review in a thread in the library forum. Does anyone have any more information on the views of the Cappodocian Fathers described below?
The third part of Myth is a "Casebook" in which Clouser makes his case about the non-neutrality of all theorizing in the fields of mathematics, physics, and psychology. This leads to a concluding chapter in Part III titled "The Need for a New Beginning," by which the author means the need for an approach to theorizing that accepts rather than denies the non-neutrality of theory and that tries to explain why it happens to be the case that all theorizing is controlled by religious beliefs. In essence, the extended argument is that all aspects of reality hang together in dependence on the Creator God and that is why human theorizing about the whole of created reality or about any particular dimension of it arises from human dependence on the Creator. In other words, theory, which arises from humans who are dependent on their Creator cannot possibly have a religiously neutral starting point. Consequently, those who try to make theoretical thought itself an independent, neutral starting point tend to absolutize one or more aspects of reality as if those aspects are non-dependent, like God. But such an approach to theorizing cannot be successful, and the lack of success shows up in various "reductionisms." By reductionism Clouser means an attempt to explain reality in terms of one part of reality that has been abstracted and posited by the thinker as unconditional and non-dependent. Successful theorizing, by contrast, requires a correct starting point, which is recognition of the dependence of the entire creation (including theory itself) on the true unconditional, non-dependent origin of reality, namely the Creator God. Clouser takes his stand then in the tradition of the Cappadocian church fathers and Calvin for whom all of human existence, including theory, was recognized to be religiously dependent on the Creator.